Near
enough for jazz?…(An
article about pitch rectification)by Dave Senior

Like many of my contemporaries I started listening to New
Orleans jazz in the fifties. The music was so exciting I wanted to play it, so I
went out and bought my first trombone. Didn’t give a fig about tuning because
it was not an issue. As soon as I knew how to make ‘B flat’ I was in the
ballpark along with the rest. Later on however, I got a little more serious and
started trying to play along with records in order to learn some of the more
challenging pieces. I soon discovered however, that getting ‘in tune’ with
the records was not always easy and sometimes not possible at all. Despite my
musical knowledge being quite limited I could find my way around the basic keys
used in traditional jazz. So, imagine my frustration, and disappointment, when I
often found myself floundering. I’m sure this must sound familiar to some.
Meanwhile, I did not realize that I was the victim of recordings that for one
reason or another were running at incorrect speeds. It was like navigating in a
tonal fog. I wondered if the musicians were playing ‘out of tune’, surely
not I thought, or whether something may have been wrong with my instrument.
Adjusting the tuning slides on the horn simply made things worse it seemed. If
only someone had told me! Of course, a turntable with a variable speed control
would have been the answer, but I am honest enough to admit that even if you’d
thrown one at me, I wouldn’t have known what to do with it. Forgive me….

Meanwhile, it is a pity that certain critics have been
known to dismiss examples of early jazz and particularly material from the
revival as being 'out of tune'. The musicians certainly weren't out of tune
though occasionally they may have had intonation problems due to frailty, the
heat, a bum piano/instrument, humidity and so on. Moreover, jazz musicians can
make 'mistakes' i.e. simply by playing 'wrong' notes or by not being
sure of the chords. Especially, abundant examples can be found on recording
sessions that were thrown together quickly (as so many were). Even undisputable
gems like the Hot 5/7s were not without their blemishes. And where would we
be without them?

This article is about tuning or, rather, it is about
‘pitch’… The fact is that many old recordings are plagued because of what
appears to be incorrect pitch and false tempos. Indeed, many old recordings have
been ‘infected’ and for several possible reasons. The reason may have been a
mechanically less than perfect original recording machine, some
fluctuations in electric current, subsequent transfers from machine to
machine etc etc. To compound the problem, the record player used to finally
listen to the ‘product’ could be the culprit. One could go on. Any permutation
of these factors may contribute to the corruption of the pitch.
Just to discount some other stories bandied about, some argue that standard
pitch wasn’t the same in those early recording days, or that the instruments
used were old ‘military’ (high pitch) ones. This latter may have had some
credence before the turn of the C19th and there might inevitably have been
transitional problems. However, it is highly unlikelythat
either of these arguments apply when referring to any early jazz recordings. The
differences between high, low and military pitch (and the instruments made to
those standards) explained below, are too great and therefore any attempt to mix
these in one ensemble would have been virtually impossible or chaos, the least.

Here are some facts on this subject: About High Pitch - Low Pitch

German orchestras in the mid-
to late 1800's played in a pitch where A=440 hz (this is the standard‘concert’ pitch of today also known as "American Standard
Pitch“). Meanwhile, bands and orchestras in France, England and the US used
"high pitch" (A=452.5 hz). To confuse matters further, U.S.
"military high pitch" was even higher at A=457 hz. However, around the
turn of the century, US, France and U.K were all starting to use low pitch by
preference. While high pitch still existed however, many horns were still made
with extra tuning shanks to allow the player to adjust. Finally, in 1917, the
American Federation of Musicians officially adopted A=440 as the standardpitch for the U.S. after whichproduction
of horns with accessory slides for high pitch adjustment rapidly declined and
eventually ceased.

So, if at one time if you mentioned the word ‘pitch’ to
me, I would have thought that you were talking about cricket or some black
sticky substance used for making boats. Only later did I become aware that pitch
was also a term used in music. According to the dictionary, in a musical context
it essentially means “highness or lowness of a note”. Importantly, it refers
to the variability of a note and you don’t necessarily have to be a musician
to recognize when something is wrong in this department. When an instrument
plays ‘off key’ or if a singer is ‘out of tune’ most people can hear it.
For example, the singer may not be respecting the same “highness or lowness of
the notes” as the orchestra. Alternatively, one or more orchestra members may
be ‘out of tune’ with each other. When these events occur we usually
perceive some sort of dissonance. Conversely, when everything is in harmony the
“highness or lowness of the notes” are concordant and the music appears to
be normal, harmonious or ‘in tune’.
It also follows that to play harmoniously together on different instruments we
need a system which tells us exactly where to ‘pitch’ our notes and which,
putting it very basically, is why there is a system, something like a grid, of
fixed keys (think of do re mi etc). Simply, if I play a note pitched at A440
(piano A) on one instrument, it should agree with the “highness or lowness”
of the same note produced on any other instrument and so on. This is more or
less what happens when we hear the musicians ‘tuning up’ before a
performance… they are ‘agreeing pitch’ with one another, after which they
will hopefully play ‘in tune’. And this is usually what happens.
But, what about ‘pitch’ in the case of recorded music? The musicians can’t
tune up any more can they? (This seems a stupid observation but wait!) Well, if
you play the recording back constantly at just the same speed that it was
recorded it will still be in tune. That much is sure. However, what about if you
play the recording at a different speed… is it still in tune then? How can you
tell? And does it matter anyway? To answer these questions I need to recount
some personal experiences.

In the late nineties a friend and musical colleague,
bassist Barry Richardson, dug out some old beat up cassettes of his old London
rock band ‘Bees Make Honey’. He knew that I was interested in computers and
had started to ‘burn’ CDs of some music that I had on tapes. That was about
the extent of what I could do then. So Barry said that he would really love to
have these old tapes transferred to CD and I agreed to have a go. Actually
putting them into the digital domain was a revelation. Without doing anything
particularly technical, by default they just seemed much brighter when on CD.
Barry was most enthusiastic and got his bass guitar out but could barely play
along with the music. There was a ’tuning’ problem. At this point, I knew
that there was a possible solution. Perhaps I could make some adjustments… My
first digital recording apparatus, primitive by modern standards because the
storage medium was minidisk, nevertheless had an adjustment facility for pitch.
Bingo, I thought, and after much trial and error I got those tracks to run in
tune and in the correct keys. In my practice studio I have a Roland digital
piano which of course is perfectly tuneable and absolutely reliable as far as
holding pitch is concerned.. Then because most of the songs were relatively easy
to play along with, at least as far as determining whether the pitch was correct
or not, in no time at all I had the knack of ascertaining the necessary
adjustments. The spin-off was that some of the songs sounded brighter in the
case of those that had been running too slow, and the reverse in others
resulting in a more relaxed feel. Wonderful, we concluded… and after some more
collaborative tweaking of the hifi we made quite a respectable job of the whole
thing. The reward here was the eventual issue of a double CD anthology on a
specialist label dedicated to the London pub rock scene of the late 60’s early
70’s. I was credited in the sleeve notes and was very proud … no dough of
course, but it certainly motivated me to engage myself further with this kind of
activity.

My next step was to familiarize myself more with the
technology and practice messing around with wave editing tools. I have so much
stuff on tapes that I thought it might be useful to transfer more of my
cassettes to CD. Meanwhile, I began to pay much more attention to the aspect of
pitch, simply because it was frequently an annoying issue. Stuff would be either
too fast or too slow. By now, I had acquired a more sophisticated wave editor
(audio processing application) and discovered that I could in fact adjust pitch
more easily just by twiddling some ‘virtual’ knobs, almost like speeding a
tape speed up or down accordingly. Moreover, I began to get curious and started
testing commercially produced CDs for pitch integrity. What I found was that
recently recorded material was nearly always correct. This is likely because
they were made digitally in the first place and have never been out of the
‘digital domain’. On the other hand, many older (jazz) recordings, where old
and originally analogue material has been dubbed (dumped might be a better
word)) into the digital domain, failed the test too many times for comfort. One
can only conclude that somebody forgot, didn’t care or didn’t know better.
What a pity. The bottom line is that if you are a producer/musician, there is no
real excuse; conversely, if you are just a producer (sans chops), you
should get someone to check your stuff before you issue it…please.

Here is an edited extract from a story published elsewhere
describing the next link in this story.In December 2002 Dan Pawson sadly passed away and I went to his funeral in
Birmingham, England along. Among the many old faces was Rob 'the raver' Ridley a
band devotee. We reminisced and you can imagine my surprise when he told me that
he still had all his reel to reel recordings that he had made of the Artesian
Hall Stompers live back in the 60’s… thirty-two hours worth … I started
compiling CD's from them just for fun. So far I have reached volume six. Luckily
the original tapes have survived quite well and the only real chore was some
pitch correction usually caused by inconsistent tape speeds (all too often
ignored by commercial producers who should know better; but that's another
story!). So, taking into account the conditions, two mikes and a lively pub
room, the results are just fine.

Well, some of these tracks now appear on the 504/La
Croix (CD93) “DAN PAWSON 1966 – 1971 A Tribute” and soon there
will be more on 504/La Croix CDs produced by ‘Lord’ Richard Ekins.

Even more recently ‘Lord’ Richard approached me to
check out his proposed re-issue on CD of the Louis James Orchestra sessions from
1967 (originally issued on vinyl). I was delighted to be trusted with this task
and set to work. There were also three tracks of the Artesian Hall Stompers from
Rob Ridley’s archive that I had not previously heard.

I set to work by first ripping the master tracks to my wave
editor. The sound quality on all tracks was excellent considering the original
tapes had been kicked around somewhat. Meanwhile as expected, the music itself
was first class as will undoubtedly be reviewed elsewhere. However, the state of
the pitch was not good at all. The Louis James tracks were running far too
slowly with the result that the music was sounding a good quarter tone below
concert pitch. Pulling these up to pitch really made a tremendous difference,
the result sounding much brighter with the consequent tweaking up of the tempo.
In the case of the Artesian sides the opposite was true. They sounded a bit
frantic, being the same problem I had experienced with the earlier batches of
AHS music. Imagine the difference when these were slowed slightly down to
reflect correct pitch and tempo. Fantastic swinging jazz at the pace and in the
correct key as originally played. Note that in both of the above cases it was
initially not really possible to ‘play along’ comfortably, if at all,
because of the false pitch situation. Now you can… if you’re a musician,
just try it and you will agree.

My conclusion is simply that in these days of digital
processing there is no longer any excuse to issue music that is not secure
pitch-wise. But they do; even the majors! (Dare I say that I have Geo Lewis at
Vespers on CD which is way, way out! Corrected it for myself. No labels
mentioned but)... say no more.

Meanwhile, times have changed and whilst I may
not have known the difference, I think that the young musician of today will. If
you plan on re-issuing old recordings please make sure they’re ‘in tune’
so we all can join in. It’s not rocket science…
Dave Senior 2008